Below
are the Cognitive Science-approved courses offered in

Spring 2012

Cognitive Psychology

PSYC 2100: Introduction to Learning and BehaviorCredits: 3Prerequisites: NoneEnrollment Restrictions: NoneDescription of course contents: The course will examine historical and current theories that explain how different types of learning provide the foundation for most, if not all, forms of an organism's behavior. We will cover these theories by carefully examining the most important research experiments that contributed to our current understanding of the principles and concepts that shape our behavior. The lecture content will focus heavily on experimental findings derived from research of learning processes in human and non-human species. The concept of Learning will be explored from the perspective of theories of Classical Conditioning, Operant Conditioning, and more recent theories of the organization of behavior derived from human studies.Instructor: Williams

PSYC 2150: Introduction to CognitionCredits: 3Prerequisites: NoneEnrollment Restrictions: NoneDescription of course contents: Cognition is the activity of knowing: the acquisition, organization, and use of knowledge. Emphasizing fundamental issues, this course introduces such basic content areas in cognitive psychology as perception, attention, memory, and language. Instructor: Jaswal

PSYC 3005: Research Methods & Data Analysis I*Note: Students with strong math or statistics backgrounds should consider taking PSYC 4005 as a substitute for PSYC 3005. Credits: 4 (Required lab)Prerequisite: PSYC 1010 and any 2000-level PSYC course and one of the following math courses with a grade of C- or higher: MATH 1210 (Applied Calculus I), MATH 1220 (Applied Calculus II), MATH 1310 (Calculus I), MATH 1320 (Calculus II), APMA 1090 (Single Variable Calculus I), or APMA 1110 (Single Variable Calculus II). Students with transfer credit or AP credit in one of these courses (e.g., AP Calculus AB, or AP Calculus BC) are exempt from the requirement. Enrollment restrictions: To be officially enrolled in PSYC 3005, registration is required for BOTH the lecture and a lab section. Otherwise, you will be dropped from the class. Instructions on how to add the lecture or lab section or how to change lab sections will be given during the first lecture.Description of course contents: Introduction to research methods in psychology, integrating statistical analysis. Emphasis on descriptive statistics and non-experimental research methods. Use of computers for data analysis, experimentation, and report writing. This course is the first part of a two-part series (PSYC 3005 and PSYC 3006).
Instructor: Morris

PSYC 3006: Research Methods & Data Analysis IICredits: 4 (Required lab)Prerequisite: PSYC 3005 (with C or better)Enrollment Restrictions: Psychology Majors/Minors, CogSci Majors
To be officially enrolled in PSYC 3005, registration is required for BOTH the lecture and a lab section. Otherwise, you will be dropped from the class. Instructions on how to add the lecture or lab section or how to change lab sections will be given during the first lecture.Description of course contents: Second part of a two-part series. Emphasis on inferential statistics (t-tests and ANOVA) and issues in experimentation.
*Note: This course may satisfy the College’s Second Writing requirement.Instructor: Freeman

PSYC 3006: Research Methods & Data Analysis IICredits: 4 (Required lab)Prerequisite: PSYC 3005 (with C or better)Enrollment Restrictions: Psychology Majors/Minors, CogSci Majors
To be officially enrolled in PSYC 3005, registration is required for BOTH the lecture and a lab section. Otherwise, you will be dropped from the class. Instructions on how to add the lecture or lab section or how to change lab sections will be given during the first lecture.Description of course contents: Second part of a two-part series. Emphasis on inferential statistics (t-tests and ANOVA) and issues in experimentation.
*Note: This course may satisfy the College’s Second Writing requirement.Instructor: Schmidt

PSYC 3490: Development in Infancy Credits: 3Prerequisites: NoneEnrollment Restrictions: Psychology Majors/Minors, Cognitive Science Majors. Description of course contents: Development during infancy is rapid and
fascinating. Changes come in how babies see, hear, move, and think. Social
influences in family, community, and culture shape the infant's development. We will go over all of these in detail with lectures, class discussions, films, and reading assignments.Instructor: Keen

PSYC 4005: Advanced Research Methods & Data Analysis I*Note: This class is a substitute for PSYC 3005. Credits: 4 (Required lab)Prerequisite: PSYC 1010 and any 2000-level PSYC course and one of the following math courses with a grade of C- or higher: MATH 1210 (Applied Calculus I), MATH 1220 (Applied Calculus II), MATH 1310 (Calculus I), MATH 1320 (Calculus II), APMA 1090 (Single Variable Calculus I), or APMA 1110 (Single Variable Calculus II). Students with transfer credit or AP credit in one of these courses (e.g., AP Calculus AB, or AP Calculus BC) are exempt from the requirement. Enrollment restrictions: To be officially enrolled in PSYC 4005, registration is required for BOTH the lecture and a lab section. Otherwise, you will be dropped from the class. Instructions on how to add the lecture or lab section or how to change lab sections will be given during the first lecture.Description of course contents: This course is the first of a two-course series
which students intending to continue to graduate school after their Bachelors
degrees may take to replace Research Methods and Data Analysis I. In this series, we start by laying out foundational mathematical concepts that are common to all or most quantitative methods in Psychology. In the second course of this series, this foundation will be used to introduce specific data analysis techniques as special cases and to introduce some research methods. The topics for this course encompass probability theory, information theory, linear algebra, test theory, and an introduction to modeling.Instructor: Von Oertzen

PSYC 4110: Psycholinguistics*Note: PSYC 4110 may be used to fulfill either the Cognitive Psychology or the Linguistics area requirement, but not both.Credits: 3Prerequisites: NoneEnrollment Restrictions: 4th years: Psychology Majors/Minors, Cognitive Science Majors, Linguistics and Communication Disorders Majors/Minors.Description of course contents: This course will discuss how linguistic models help us to understand the psychology of language. We will focus on the emergence of language in children, acquisition and development of language, language disorders and neurolinguistics, sociolinguistics, and bilingualism.Instructor: Loncke

PSYC 4111: Language Development and Disorders *Note: PSYC 4110 may be used to fulfill either the Cognitive Psychology or the Linguistics area requirement, but not both. Either PSYC 4111: Language Development and Disorders (Bonvillian) or PSYC 5310: Developmental Psycholinguistics (Bonvillian) may be taken for credit, but not both.Credits: 3Prerequisites: NoneEnrollment Restrictions: 4th years: Psychology Majors/Minors, Cognitive Science Majors, and Linguistics Majors/Minors.Description of course contents: This course will focus on language and cognitive development in persons with disabilities. Among the populations examined will be children with autistic disorder, children with Williams syndrome, deaf children, developmentally dysphasic children, adults with aphasia, and children with severe mental retardation. In addition to spoken language development, the course will examine the acquisition of sign communication skills.Instructor: Bonvillian

PSYC 4120: Psychology of ReadingCredits: 3Prerequisite: PSYC 3005 or Instructor PermissionEnrollment Restrictions: 4th years: Psychology Majors/Minors, Cognitive Science Majors, and Linguistics Majors/Minors.Description of course contents: For psychologists who study the psychology of
reading, it sometimes amazes us that most literate people do not think much about
the reading process. If you ask the typical person about how reading works, a
typical response is that …it just does. I look at words on a page and then the
sounds come out of my mouth. You might also hear… I do not know how I do it,
but for as long as I can remember I could do it. Under certain circumstances, however, a deeper level of evaluation is forthcoming and people report that it is a very complicated process. Listening to someone who has some type of reading impairment, observing young children as they are learning to read, wondering about the meaning of a passage (Did the main character insult a minor character or was it the other way around?), debating the pronunciation of a word (greasy, Roanoke, Staunton, theater, insurance), or reading a passage in a second language, readers make evaluations/decisions during the reading process. The
focus of this class, Psychology of Reading, is the study of the reading process; what happens when we process the squiggles on the page to meaningful information that we can use. This includes word processing, sentence processing, speed-reading, text comprehension, etc. All of this is related to how the brain works and how we think. We will read basic/historical information from texts, review recent psychological research articles, and consider some hands-on experiences related to the reading process. The Psychology of Reading course is an interesting mix of experimental & cognitive psychology and structural linguistics, as well as psychoneurology, phonetics, anthropology, sociology, education, and so on.Instructor: Adams

PSYC 4559-2: The New Science of the UnconsciousCredits: 3Prerequisites: None Enrollment Restrictions: 4th years: Psychology Majors/Minors and Cognitive Science Majors Description of course contents: This course covers psychological topics that inform students about the automatic nature of our minds, such as memory, stereotypes, and perception, in traditional lecture and discussion formats. This empirical knowledge is applied to real-world problems such as hiring discrimination, public policy, or politics, through class demonstrations and activities.Instructor: Hawkins

PSYC 4559-3: Social-Cognitive Development: Learning from OthersCredits: 3 Prerequisites: NoneEnrollment Restrictions: 4th years: Psychology Majors/Minors and Cognitive Science MajorsDescription of course contents: Could you imagine trying to learn everything you know from firsthand experience? Learning from other people saves us time, and gives us opportunities to learn about interesting things that would be difficult or dangerous to learn about otherwise – who Thomas Jefferson is or to avoid touching hot stoves, for example. But blindly believing everything you’re told isn’t always beneficial either: everybody makes mistakes, after all! So, how do we learn when to believe other people and when to be skeptical? By the time we are about seven years old, we have developed surprisingly sophisticated means to evaluate and make judgments about the quality of information we receive and the people who provide it, and are able to use these judgments to guide our learning and make predictions about our social world. In this course we will read cutting edge research, make live observations, and reflect on how children learn from other people.

Here is a snapshot of the range of topics we will cover:
1) How children develop an understanding of others’ mental states
2) Individual differences that influence children’s learning (e.g., autism, siblings)
3) How children learn to make sense of and predict the behavior of other people
4) How these factors contribute to social cognitive development (e.g., morality)Instructor: Kondrad

PSYC 4559-5: Autobiography and IdentityCredits: 3Prerequisites: None Enrollment Restrictions: 4th years: Psychology Majors/Minors and Cognitive Science Majors Description of course contents: This course is intended to explore the psychological intersection of autobiography and identity. Autobiographies, generally understood as conscious presentations of self, vary widely across cultures and time. In this case, the focus will be on the span from the historically early statements in the Western canon, such as tomb inscriptions, Res Gestae of Augustus, and the Confessions of St. Augustine through late 20th and early 21st century autobiographies, such as The Woman Warrior by Kingston, Notes of A Native Son by Baldwin, and Leaving Pipe Shop by McDowell. The psychological ideas of identity and the narrative of oneself will be explored at the same time, using contemporary materials, such as Schacter’s Searching for Memory, Lehrer’s Proust Was a Neuroscientist, and McAdams’s The Stories We Live By. The focus of discussion will be on how identity is represented, how the author selects and describes aspects of his or her life, and how we can understand these choices in light of current research on memory and other, related cognitive processes. Instructor: Hale

PSYC 5315: Pleasure Credits: 3 Prerequisites: NoneEnrollment Restrictions: 4th years: Psychology Majors/Minors and Cognitive Science Majors; GSASDescription of course contents: This seminar explores the nature of pleasure. It is divided into three parts. The first deals with pleasures of the body, such as tonic (sustained) pleasures and relief pleasures. The second deals with the pleasurability of episodes and their relation to the pervasive human propensity to create narratives. The third deals with the context within which episodes emerge and analyses the stricture of lives. Instructor: Kubovy

PSYC 5559-2: Individual Differences in Cognition and Personality Credits: 3 Prerequisites: NoneEnrollment Restrictions: 4th years: Psychology Majors/Minors and Cognitive Science Majors; GSASDescription of course contents: This course is a survey of individual differences in personality and cognition. Among the topics to be covered are methods of assessing individual differences in personality and cognition, relations between personality and cognition, influences of nature and nurture, developmental trends, neural substrates, and prediction of real world outcomes. The organization will be a seminar with the instructor presenting an overview of the topic in the first half of each class and student discussion in the second half. Instructor: Salthouse

PSYC 5559-3: Measurement: Item Response TheoryCredits: 3 Prerequisites: PSYC 3006 or PSYC 7710Enrollment Restrictions: 4th years: Psychology Majors/Minors and Cognitive Science Majors; GSASDescription of course contents: This course is designed to introduce you to the basic concepts of item response theory (IRT) and their application to substantive psychological problems. By the end of this semester you should be able to: a) understand and apply the principles of item response theory in your own research and in evaluating the research of others, b) perform and interpret item response theory model analyses for dichotomous and polytomous data, using various IRT programs, and c) communicate IRT research findings to an audience of psychologists. Instructor: Schmidt

PSYC 5559-4: Machine Learning and Data Mining Credits: 3 Prerequisites: NoneEnrollment Restrictions: 4th years: Psychology Majors/Minors and Cognitive Science MajorsDescription of course contents: While most psychological studies ask "is something different between groups?", in this course we will introduce quantitative methods to answer the question "what is different between groups?", ie., we ask which part (or combination) of our data maximizes the chances to distinguish between given groups. To make a computer answer this question, we will introduce some foundations of machine learning and play with some of these techniques. Instructor: Von Oertzen

PSYC 5559-6: Brain Systems Involved in Learning and Memory*Note: PSYC 5559-6 may be used to fulfill either the Cognitive Psychology or the Neuroscience area requirement, but not both.Credits: 3Prerequisites: PSYC 2200 or PSYC 4200 Enrollment Restrictions: 4th years: Psychology Majors/Minors and Cognitive Science Majors and Neuroscience Majors; GSAS Description of course contents: The seminar will examine historical and current experimental findings that describe the contribution of neuroanatomical structures in regulating memory formation. An extensive review of the literature will be covered to understand how separate brain regions interact to modify our capacity to learn and then encode new information into memory storage. The literature reviews will assist in identifying how activity in specific brain regions regulates decision making, memory storage during sleep, spatial learning, memory for emotionally-laden events, post traumatic stress disorder, drug addiction, Alzheimer's disease, learning disabilities, etc. Instructor: Williams

Neuroscience

PSYC 2200: Introduction to PsychobiologyCredits: 3Prerequisites: NoneEnrollment Restrictions: NoneDescription of course contents: After an overview of brain structure and
organization, the course examines what we know about the biological bases of
perception, learning and memory, emotion and psychopathology, as well as the
regulatory behaviors: sleep, thirst, eating, sex, and those associated with psychoneuroimmunology. Instructor: Hill

PSYC 3220: Neurobiology of Learning and Memory Credits: 3Prerequisites: 6 credits in Psychology, including PSYC 2200 Enrollment Restrictions: Psychology Majors /Minors and Cognitive Science MajorsDescription of course contents: This seminar will examine the neural basis of learning and memory. We will study brain systems that mediate different types of learning and memory as well as the cellular and molecular mechanisms that allow these systems to acquire and store information. The course will begin with a historical overview of learning and memory research in psychology and transition into modern studies in behavioral neuroscience. Topics will include memory consolidation, neural plasticity, cellular competition for memory storage, the role of neurogenesis in learning and memory and mechanisms of retention and forgetting. We will also discuss disorders that produce memory impairments in humans and current attempts to model these in animals and develop treatments.Instructor: Wiltgen

PSYC 5559-1: Affective Neuroscience Credits: 3Prerequisites:Enrollment Restrictions: 4th years: Psychology Majors/Minors and Cognitive Science Majors; GSAS Description of course contents: Affective neuroscience is the study of the neural bases of emotion. The main goals of this course are: a) to provide an introduction to the major contemporary theories of emotion; b) to provide an introduction to theory and research into the neuroanatomical and neurochemical correlates and substrates of emotion and affective psychopathology; and c) to provide an introduction to the practical, methodological and inferential challenges facing affective neuroscience as a discipline. Instructor: Coan

PSYC 5559-6: Brain Systems Involved in Learning and Memory*Note: PSYC 5559-6 may be used to fulfill either the Neuroscience or the Cognitive Psychology area requirement, but not both.Credits: 3Prerequisites: PSYC 2200 or PSYC 4200 Enrollment Restrictions: 4th years: Psychology Majors/Minors and Cognitive Science Majors and Neuroscience Majors; GSAS Description of course contents: The seminar will examine historical and current experimental findings that describe the contribution of neuroanatomical structures in regulating memory formation. An extensive review of the literature will be covered to understand how separate brain regions interact to modify our capacity to learn and then encode new information into memory storage. The literature reviews will assist in identifying how activity in specific brain regions regulates decision making, memory storage during sleep, spatial learning, memory for emotionally-laden events, post traumatic stress disorder, drug addiction, Alzheimer's disease, learning disabilities, etc. Instructor: Williams

BIOL 3250: Introduction to Animal BehaviorCredits: 3Prerequisites: BIOL 2010 and BIOL 2020 Description of course contents: An introduction to comparative studies of animal behavior from neuroethological and evolutionary perspectives. The first deals with proximate causes of behavior, with emphases on motor, sensory and central aspects of the nervous system. The second deals with ultimate causes, with emphases on natural selection, natural history, and adaptive aspects of behavior.Instructors: Friesen

BIOL 4310: Sensory Biology/BIOL 7310: Sensory NeurobiologyCredits: 3Prerequisites: BIOL 3170 Description of course contents: Examines the anatomy, physiology, and molecular biology of many sensory modalities such as vision, audition, and chemosensation. General features of sensory systems are described.Instructor: Provencio

BIOL 4490: Neural Systems and BehaviorCredits: 3Prerequisites: BIOL 3170 and BIOL 3250Description of course contents: This is an upper level lecture/discussion course for students interested in pursuing additional studies in neurobiology beyond the introductory level.Instructor: Mellon

BME 3636: Neural Network Models of Cognition and Brain Computation
Credits: 3Prerequisites: CS 1110 and BME 2101 or Instructor PermissionDescription of course contents: This is an introductory course to neural networks research, specifically biologically-based networks that reproduce cognitive phenomena. The goal of this course is to teach the basic thinking and methodologies used in constructing and understanding neural-like networks. Instructor: Levy

Linguistics

ANTH 5401: Linguistic Field MethodsCredits: 3Prerequisite: None Description of course contents: In this course we will work with a native speaker of an "exotic" language (i.e., a language that is not commonly taught in the U.S., hence likely not to be familiar to any of the students in the class). We try to figure out the phonological and grammatical structure of the language based on data collected from the native speaker consultant in class. Attendance is therefore mandatory. Instructor: Contini-Morava

EDHS 5020: Introduction to Speech and Hearing ScienceCredits: 3Prerequisites: EDHS 501 and 505Description of course contents: Examines principal concepts and procedures for the study of physiologic, perceptual, and acoustic aspects of voice, speech, and hearing.Instructor: Loncke

PSYC 4110: Psycholinguistics*Note: PSYC 4110 may be used to fulfill either the Linguistics or the Cognitive Psychology area requirement, but not both.Credits: 3Prerequisites: NoneEnrollment Restrictions: 4th years: Psychology Majors/Minors, Cognitive Science Majors, Linguistics and Communication Disorders Majors/Minors.Description of course contents: This course will discuss how linguistic models help us to understand the psychology of language. We will focus on the emergence of language in children, acquisition and development of language, language disorders and neurolinguistics, sociolinguistics, and bilingualism.Instructor: Loncke

PSYC 4111: Language Development and Disorders *Note: PSYC 4111 may be used to fulfill either the Linguistics or the Cognitive Psychology area requirement, but not both. Either PSYC 4111: Language Development and Disorders (Bonvillian) or PSYC 5310: Developmental Psycholinguistics (Bonvillian) may be taken for credit, but not both.Credits: 3Prerequisites: NoneEnrollment Restrictions: 4th years: Psychology Majors/Minors, Cognitive Science Majors, Linguistics Majors/Minors.Description of course contents: This course will focus on language and cognitive development in persons with disabilities. Among the populations examined will be children with autistic disorder, children with Williams syndrome, deaf children, developmentally dysphasic children, adults with aphasia, and children with severe mental retardation. In addition to spoken language development, the course will examine the acquisition of sign communication skills.Instructor: Bonvillian

PSYC 4120: Psychology of Reading *Note: PSYC 4120 may be used to fulfill either the Linguistics or the Cognitive Psychology area requirement, but not both.Credits: 3Prerequisites: PSYC 3005 or Instructor Permission Enrollment Restrictions: 4th years: Psychology Majors/Minors, Cognitive Science Majors, and Linguistics Majors/Minors Description of course contents: For psychologists who study the psychology of reading, it sometimes amazes us that most literate people do not think much about the reading process. If you ask the typical person about how reading works, a typical response is that …it just does. I look at words on a page and then the sounds come out of my mouth. You might also hear… I do not know how I do it but for as long as I can remember I could do it. Under certain circumstances, however, a deeper level of evaluation is forthcoming and people report that it is a very complicated process. Listening to someone who has some type of reading impairment, observing young children as they are learning to read, wondering about the meaning of a passage (Did the main character insult a minor character or was it the other way around?), debating the pronunciation of a word (greasy, Roanoke, Staunton, theater, insurance), or reading a passage in a second language, readers make evaluations/decisions during the reading process. The focus of this class, Psychology of Reading, is the study of the reading process; what happens when we process the squiggles on the page to meaningful information that we can use. This includes word processing, sentence processing, speed-reading, text comprehension, etc. All of this is related to how the brain works and how we think. We will read basic/historical information from texts, review recent psychological research articles, and consider some hands-on experiences related to the reading process. The Psychology of Reading course is an interesting mix of experimental & cognitive psychology and structural linguistics, as well as psychoneurology, phonetics, anthropology, sociology, education, and so on. Instructor: Adams

SPAN 4530: Second Language AcquisitionCredits: 3Prerequisites: SPAN 3010 and SPAN 3000 or SPAN 3200 or another
course in LinguisticsDescription of course contents: How do people learn a second language? How are first language acquisition and second language acquisition different? Why are some learners more successful than others in learning a second language? How does one measure “success” in second language acquisition? How do we define “competence”? I invite you to join me in the exploration of these and other exciting questions. Together we will discover the processes and mechanisms that drive language acquisition by studying how three different areas – linguistics, psychology, and sociocultural perspectives – have contributed to the major theories and ideas informing the field of Second Language Acquisition. Conducted in Spanish.Instructor: Scida